10 ms·

San Francisco's Fog Over Growth

111 points by saeranv 11y ago

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
It's a shame that when people focus on the bay area's ludicrous housing costs, they tend to speak exclusively of San Francisco and ignore the opportunity to develop Oakland, which has a lot of flat land that is easier to build tall buildings on top of, instead of trying to densify San Francisco's endless peaks and twists. The author said a potential future for San Francisco is as a "gated community for the rich." That may be the case, perhaps already having been so for a long time. It's unfortunate that an economic juggernaut heralded as the shining center of modern American capitalism is also so inaccessible, but that does not mean the overall solution is by making that place accessible at the expense of more realistic options. The author compares the density of SF to NYC's Brooklyn. Like Manhattan, San Francisco is owned by the rich and their rules, yet Brooklyn is big and booming. Oakland is prime to take up the role of the Bay's Brooklyn. Side note: if people want to return to the halcyon days of San Francisco when the wealthy and the workers could live atop the same rock, it will cost a ton of money. Hairdressers, grocery clerks, teachers, and the like will either need massive housing subsidies or comparable salaries to tech workers. That possibility could exist too, if the well-heeled agree to let go of a big chunk of change.
- gravity13 11y ago
  I get the sense Manhattan was established, and then tapped out, hence Brooklyn. Whereas San Francisco is neither of those. San Francisco is the hip place to be (for tech) and Oakland is perceived as the fallback for companies that can't afford to host. Which really surmounts to: I would much rather work in SF than Oakland (I really base my decision on what food & bar options I have around me, though).
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Well, most of Brooklyn probably wasn't all that appealing (for certain values and types of appealing) 15 or 20 years ago either. [1] At any rate, it wasn't gentrified. But Manhattan, in spite of doing a fair bit of development in at least sections of the city, was really expensive so young professionals started "settling" on Brooklyn. At the same time, some areas of Manhattan that were previously, shall we say, rather disreputable were also gentrifying. So, yes, you'd prefer to live in SF than Oakland but 15 years or so ago, you'd probably have preferred to live in Manhattan than Brooklyn. [1] http://www.wired.com/2015/09/photos-brooklyn-hipsters/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/photos-brooklyn-hipsters/
  - sethhochberg 11y ago
    Parts of Manhattan which are popular with the very wealthy are certainly pretty well tapped out (the West Village comes to mind as a neighborhood with well-protected zoning regulations and lots of low to mid-rise buildings similar to many San Francisco neighborhoods). In other parts of Manhattan though new neighborhoods are being created from underused space (look at the Hudson Yards project, creating thousands of housing and commercial units on top of an active rail yard on the west side of midtown). Dozens of new towers are currently under construction in Manhattan. I've lived in both SF and NYC and feel like Oakland has much more of a stigma than Brooklyn does simply because of transit access. You can live in SF and enjoy walkable local communities. You can live in Oakland and enjoy walkable local communities. But getting between the two can be a much more arduous process via Bart or bus than the many plentiful subway connections between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Visiting friends, of even the prospect of a commute, between SF and Oakland would have given me much more pause than getting over to Brooklyn. BART and the transbay buses are woefully inadequate for an area which is trying to pitch itself as a region rather than two distinct cities with a bridge between.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      That seems a good assessment. I suspect that there may be a bit of hindsight bias about Brooklyn, given that we know today that (parts of) it did gentrify and quite rapidly. But your point about transportation links--and, heck, a bridge you can walk over--is well taken.
    - mahyarm 11y ago
      I really don't understand the entire BART tube fear. You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule. I think it's more the bridge with it's horrible 1 hour traffic and how most of the bay area is a very car dependent place.
      - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
        BART can be standing room only quite often during commutes, but if you're going from Market Street to an Oakland station, its really not that big of a deal.
  - danans 11y ago
    You may not be aware that Oakland has an amazing and burgeoning food and bar scene, one that has arguably stolen the authenticity crown from San Francisco. Traditional restaurants also are alive and well in Oakland if that's your thing.
  - Apocryphon 11y ago
    Your comment seems a few years out of date. SF's rents and COL is notoriously sky-high and has been for the last 3-4 years or so, and the movement to Oakland has also been taking place during that year. Not to mention, Uber, perhaps one of the region's greatest up-and-coming unicorn juggernauts, is going to move to Oakland. The ship has long since sailed towards the East Bay.
- Kalium 11y ago
  > It's a shame that when people focus on the bay area's ludicrous housing costs, they tend to speak exclusively of San Francisco and ignore the opportunity to develop Oakland, which has a lot of flat land that is easier to build tall buildings on top of, instead of trying to densify San Francisco's endless peaks and twists. It doesn't get ignored. The problem is that Oakland costs about as much to develop as SF does with potential revenues that are much lower. It's a terrible business proposition.
- pfooti 11y ago
  I'm not sure about Oakland's geology, but the part of SF where I live (outer sunset) is more or less just houses on top of sand dunes. I'm no geologist, but I've always wondered how well one could build tall buildings on that kind of ground.
- vhold 11y ago
  Imagine how different San Francisco would be if plans like this had moved forward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_Mountain#Westbay_Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_Mountain#Westbay_Con... Not only did they want to fill the bay in with the mountain, they wanted to build another Bay Bridge there.
pluckytree 11y ago
I agree that part of the motivation for people supporting zoning is to preserve or increase their property values. But I think that people that spend a huge chunk of change on a house should care about preserving the neighborhood they bought into. As an extreme case, without zoning, what if each home lot on your street were turned into a high rise residential or commercial building? I don’t think any homeowner expects nothing to change, but they bought a house hoping that it continues to have a similar quality of life going forward. It’s not all about money. Peace and quiet is important to people, for example. Lack of traffic is important to people. Having one neighbor on each side rather than 100 is important to people.
- Retric 11y ago
  If every house around you is turned into a high-rise then your property values are going to shoot up massively. So, cash out and move. The real question is why can 1x people living in an area decide that 99x people get to move there or not. In the end Mixed use walkable communities are much better for both peoples health and the environment. You can always move to the middle of Montana if you don't want to live near development, but carving out the hart of city's and saying "FU I have got mine" causes worlds of problems.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Low-rise San Francisco is very pleasant, probably the most pleasant place I could imagine living. It's quite walkable and quiet in the right places. And in a place like that you can know your neighbors. Ironically, people live more segmented lives the higher buildings get. I also understand why people would want to maintain the quality of life they had when they purchased their house, even if it is at the expense of community at large. As such, there should be a significant property tax to compensate for comfort when housing costs are so high. Then again, the city and state have bizarre tax laws for property so I could be suggesting a political impossibility for all I know.
    - crzwdjk 11y ago
      Unfortunately, property tax law in California does the exact opposite. The tax can't be higher than 1% of the assessed value of the house, and that assessment can't go up by more than 2% every year as long as the house isn't sold. So the people who have been living in the neighborhood the longest and complain the most about "neighborhood character" also pay much less property tax than their neighbors. And by "much less" I mean 10-20 times less in some cases, given how much property values have gone up over the past 40 or so years.
gmarx 11y ago
"would lift U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent"? Really? Over what period of time? If it's one year it's unbelievable. If it's over 50 years, who cares?
- raldi 11y ago
  I believe the calculation is for when the system approached its new steady state. And why shouldn't one care about the world of fifty years from now? I intend to still be alive, and so will a lot of the people I care about. Plus it's not like we'd see no improvement whatsoever for 49 years and then WHAM. We'd see gradual returns on this investment every year.
- JauntTrooper 11y ago
  Most recent US GDP: $17.914 trillion. 9.5% of that would yield an additional $1.7 trillion of net goods and services produced by our economy. For comparison, we spend ~$0.85 trillion on Social Security and ~$0.6 trillion on defense a year.
MichaelTerry 11y ago
I like FOG, It looks amazing isn't it?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
entee 11y ago
The point about people in rent controlled apartments having very little incentive to favor increased density is a different one than I've heard, and a telling one. If between owners and rent-controlled apartments you have a large voting majority, you end up with a large voting majority that has no interest in making the city more welcoming to newcomers. People often talk about middle class people being driven out of SF, I think it's actually dangerous that even people making well above average wages have trouble affording housing alone. Many tech workers I know earn a decent living but having an apartment to themselves is simply unaffordable. Yes, yes #richpeopleproblems, and of course we should worry about people further down the income scale, but it's indicative of just how pathological the situation has become that even people who are well off can't afford the city comfortably.
pfooti 11y ago
Legit thought experiment and not a troll, because I'm curious about thinking through this. What happens if legislation is passed that more or less prevents people from owning property that's not their primary residence? Like: if you don't live in it more than 190 days a year, you pay a really high property tax on it. I've always thought a big part of the landlord - tenant issues around rent control, fair market housing, and a lot of other stuff all stems from the position that people are allowed to own more homes that they can live in, and derive income from landlording. There's some obvious issues - not everyone wants to live in a home / apartment that they own (liquidity, mortgage, etc). This could be obviated with some workarounds (and market forces might help out a bit too - I'd imagine real estate could change hands a lot more frequently in that situation). Anyway. Thoughts?
- 0xffff2 11y ago
  Have you ever bought a house? I have. I do not want to go through that process every time I move. Plus, while I have purchased a house before, it ended up being foreclosed on and I certainly couldn't get a mortgage now (and I shouldn't... I can't afford a mortgage). I would be pretty SOL if owning a house was a prerequisite for not being homeless. How is commercial property treated? What prevents a company building a huge apartment building, "selling" it to an apartment manager (in the form of a very expensive mortgage) and then having the apartment manager rent out "rooms" in his very large "house" to cover his mortgage? In short, the longer I think about the idea, the less practical it becomes.
  - brk 11y ago
    I've bought a few houses, the process has generally been simple and painless (other than the physical moving of stuff part, which is the same for own vs. rent). My last few vehicles purchases have involved significantly more paperwork and signatures than my most recent property purchases. What is it about the process that you've had issues with?
    - 0xffff2 11y ago
      Our experiences differ vastly. Granted I've only bought one house and it was 8 years ago. Maybe things have gotten better in the intervening years? My experience buying cars has involved signing maybe a dozen pages, while my experience buying a house involved signing form after form after form (most of which I didn't really know the purpose of) for literally hours. I'm certain I spent more time just signing paperwork to buy my house than I've ever spent on the entire car buying process from the time I walked into the sales guy's office after the test drive to the time I drove off the lot.
narrator 11y ago
Being a Bay Area native, my opinion is that the push back to increased growth is due to the horrible traffic situation. More people means traffic gets worse, muni gets more crowded, commutes get longer. The only people who want growth are real estate developers and recent transplants who are fine with not trying to actually go anywhere besides home and work. There's a point where the congestion starts to lower quality of life drastically and people would rather deal with high rents then being stuck in traffic for hours or stuffed into a filled to the gills muni, bart or caltrain with people coughing up flem around them. Getting to work in downtown is awful when there's a Giants game going on and they wanted to eliminate pier 30 parking and put another stadium in there? I'm glad that got shot down. San Francisco is full. Get over it.
- api 11y ago
  Too bad transportation infrastructure is completely verboten in America. New York has it grandfathered in (was built before the car era) and New York does not have this problem. The simple reality is that cars don't scale beyond a certain density because, well, cars can't pass through other cars. Cars work fine for light to medium density but beyond that you must either build trains or stop growing. (Or waste billions and countless hours every day with millions of people stuck in traffic.)
  - tsunamifury 11y ago
    My favorite part is that SF has gotten it in its head that being car-unfriendly (planned closing of Market St) is a great idea, while not improving public transit at all.
AlexWest 11y ago
People who want to move here (for opportunities or work) by definition do not have an established life here, are not part of our community, do not have family and friends they have known for years based here, and have not worked to contribute to making San Francisco what it is. I am not overly concerned about how hard it may be for them to arrive.
wmil 11y ago
It's interesting that SF can be so pro-immigration on the national level, but so anti-immigration on the municipal level.
- cgy1 11y ago
  Because it's somehow become socially acceptable to hate on whites and Asians.
  - millermp12 11y ago
    Not sure if it's race, the Left's refrain should be: "You can Over Come, just don't Come Over Here."

111 points by saeranv 11y ago

It's a shame that when people focus on the bay area's ludicrous housing costs, they tend to speak exclusively of San Francisco and ignore the opportunity to develop Oakland, which has a lot of flat land that is easier to build tall buildings on top of, instead of trying to densify San Francisco's endless peaks and twists. The author said a potential future for San Francisco is as a "gated community for the rich." That may be the case, perhaps already having been so for a long time. It's unfortunate that an economic juggernaut heralded as the shining center of modern American capitalism is also so inaccessible, but that does not mean the overall solution is by making that place accessible at the expense of more realistic options. The author compares the density of SF to NYC's Brooklyn. Like Manhattan, San Francisco is owned by the rich and their rules, yet Brooklyn is big and booming. Oakland is prime to take up the role of the Bay's Brooklyn. Side note: if people want to return to the halcyon days of San Francisco when the wealthy and the workers could live atop the same rock, it will cost a ton of money. Hairdressers, grocery clerks, teachers, and the like will either need massive housing subsidies or comparable salaries to tech workers. That possibility could exist too, if the well-heeled agree to let go of a big chunk of change.

gravity13 11y ago
I get the sense Manhattan was established, and then tapped out, hence Brooklyn. Whereas San Francisco is neither of those. San Francisco is the hip place to be (for tech) and Oakland is perceived as the fallback for companies that can't afford to host. Which really surmounts to: I would much rather work in SF than Oakland (I really base my decision on what food & bar options I have around me, though).
- ghaff 11y ago
  Well, most of Brooklyn probably wasn't all that appealing (for certain values and types of appealing) 15 or 20 years ago either. [1] At any rate, it wasn't gentrified. But Manhattan, in spite of doing a fair bit of development in at least sections of the city, was really expensive so young professionals started "settling" on Brooklyn. At the same time, some areas of Manhattan that were previously, shall we say, rather disreputable were also gentrifying. So, yes, you'd prefer to live in SF than Oakland but 15 years or so ago, you'd probably have preferred to live in Manhattan than Brooklyn. [1] http://www.wired.com/2015/09/photos-brooklyn-hipsters/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/photos-brooklyn-hipsters/
- sethhochberg 11y ago
  Parts of Manhattan which are popular with the very wealthy are certainly pretty well tapped out (the West Village comes to mind as a neighborhood with well-protected zoning regulations and lots of low to mid-rise buildings similar to many San Francisco neighborhoods). In other parts of Manhattan though new neighborhoods are being created from underused space (look at the Hudson Yards project, creating thousands of housing and commercial units on top of an active rail yard on the west side of midtown). Dozens of new towers are currently under construction in Manhattan. I've lived in both SF and NYC and feel like Oakland has much more of a stigma than Brooklyn does simply because of transit access. You can live in SF and enjoy walkable local communities. You can live in Oakland and enjoy walkable local communities. But getting between the two can be a much more arduous process via Bart or bus than the many plentiful subway connections between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Visiting friends, of even the prospect of a commute, between SF and Oakland would have given me much more pause than getting over to Brooklyn. BART and the transbay buses are woefully inadequate for an area which is trying to pitch itself as a region rather than two distinct cities with a bridge between.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    That seems a good assessment. I suspect that there may be a bit of hindsight bias about Brooklyn, given that we know today that (parts of) it did gentrify and quite rapidly. But your point about transportation links--and, heck, a bridge you can walk over--is well taken.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    I really don't understand the entire BART tube fear. You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule. I think it's more the bridge with it's horrible 1 hour traffic and how most of the bay area is a very car dependent place.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      BART can be standing room only quite often during commutes, but if you're going from Market Street to an Oakland station, its really not that big of a deal.
- danans 11y ago
  You may not be aware that Oakland has an amazing and burgeoning food and bar scene, one that has arguably stolen the authenticity crown from San Francisco. Traditional restaurants also are alive and well in Oakland if that's your thing.
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  Your comment seems a few years out of date. SF's rents and COL is notoriously sky-high and has been for the last 3-4 years or so, and the movement to Oakland has also been taking place during that year. Not to mention, Uber, perhaps one of the region's greatest up-and-coming unicorn juggernauts, is going to move to Oakland. The ship has long since sailed towards the East Bay.
Kalium 11y ago
> It's a shame that when people focus on the bay area's ludicrous housing costs, they tend to speak exclusively of San Francisco and ignore the opportunity to develop Oakland, which has a lot of flat land that is easier to build tall buildings on top of, instead of trying to densify San Francisco's endless peaks and twists. It doesn't get ignored. The problem is that Oakland costs about as much to develop as SF does with potential revenues that are much lower. It's a terrible business proposition.
pfooti 11y ago
I'm not sure about Oakland's geology, but the part of SF where I live (outer sunset) is more or less just houses on top of sand dunes. I'm no geologist, but I've always wondered how well one could build tall buildings on that kind of ground.
vhold 11y ago
Imagine how different San Francisco would be if plans like this had moved forward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_Mountain#Westbay_Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_Mountain#Westbay_Con... Not only did they want to fill the bay in with the mountain, they wanted to build another Bay Bridge there.

pluckytree 11y ago

I agree that part of the motivation for people supporting zoning is to preserve or increase their property values. But I think that people that spend a huge chunk of change on a house should care about preserving the neighborhood they bought into. As an extreme case, without zoning, what if each home lot on your street were turned into a high rise residential or commercial building? I don’t think any homeowner expects nothing to change, but they bought a house hoping that it continues to have a similar quality of life going forward. It’s not all about money. Peace and quiet is important to people, for example. Lack of traffic is important to people. Having one neighbor on each side rather than 100 is important to people.

Retric 11y ago
If every house around you is turned into a high-rise then your property values are going to shoot up massively. So, cash out and move. The real question is why can 1x people living in an area decide that 99x people get to move there or not. In the end Mixed use walkable communities are much better for both peoples health and the environment. You can always move to the middle of Montana if you don't want to live near development, but carving out the hart of city's and saying "FU I have got mine" causes worlds of problems.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Low-rise San Francisco is very pleasant, probably the most pleasant place I could imagine living. It's quite walkable and quiet in the right places. And in a place like that you can know your neighbors. Ironically, people live more segmented lives the higher buildings get. I also understand why people would want to maintain the quality of life they had when they purchased their house, even if it is at the expense of community at large. As such, there should be a significant property tax to compensate for comfort when housing costs are so high. Then again, the city and state have bizarre tax laws for property so I could be suggesting a political impossibility for all I know.
  - crzwdjk 11y ago
    Unfortunately, property tax law in California does the exact opposite. The tax can't be higher than 1% of the assessed value of the house, and that assessment can't go up by more than 2% every year as long as the house isn't sold. So the people who have been living in the neighborhood the longest and complain the most about "neighborhood character" also pay much less property tax than their neighbors. And by "much less" I mean 10-20 times less in some cases, given how much property values have gone up over the past 40 or so years.

gmarx 11y ago

"would lift U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent"? Really? Over what period of time? If it's one year it's unbelievable. If it's over 50 years, who cares?

raldi 11y ago
I believe the calculation is for when the system approached its new steady state. And why shouldn't one care about the world of fifty years from now? I intend to still be alive, and so will a lot of the people I care about. Plus it's not like we'd see no improvement whatsoever for 49 years and then WHAM. We'd see gradual returns on this investment every year.
JauntTrooper 11y ago
Most recent US GDP: $17.914 trillion. 9.5% of that would yield an additional $1.7 trillion of net goods and services produced by our economy. For comparison, we spend ~$0.85 trillion on Social Security and ~$0.6 trillion on defense a year.

MichaelTerry 11y ago

I like FOG, It looks amazing isn't it?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

entee 11y ago

The point about people in rent controlled apartments having very little incentive to favor increased density is a different one than I've heard, and a telling one. If between owners and rent-controlled apartments you have a large voting majority, you end up with a large voting majority that has no interest in making the city more welcoming to newcomers. People often talk about middle class people being driven out of SF, I think it's actually dangerous that even people making well above average wages have trouble affording housing alone. Many tech workers I know earn a decent living but having an apartment to themselves is simply unaffordable. Yes, yes #richpeopleproblems, and of course we should worry about people further down the income scale, but it's indicative of just how pathological the situation has become that even people who are well off can't afford the city comfortably.

pfooti 11y ago

Legit thought experiment and not a troll, because I'm curious about thinking through this. What happens if legislation is passed that more or less prevents people from owning property that's not their primary residence? Like: if you don't live in it more than 190 days a year, you pay a really high property tax on it. I've always thought a big part of the landlord - tenant issues around rent control, fair market housing, and a lot of other stuff all stems from the position that people are allowed to own more homes that they can live in, and derive income from landlording. There's some obvious issues - not everyone wants to live in a home / apartment that they own (liquidity, mortgage, etc). This could be obviated with some workarounds (and market forces might help out a bit too - I'd imagine real estate could change hands a lot more frequently in that situation). Anyway. Thoughts?

0xffff2 11y ago
Have you ever bought a house? I have. I do not want to go through that process every time I move. Plus, while I have purchased a house before, it ended up being foreclosed on and I certainly couldn't get a mortgage now (and I shouldn't... I can't afford a mortgage). I would be pretty SOL if owning a house was a prerequisite for not being homeless. How is commercial property treated? What prevents a company building a huge apartment building, "selling" it to an apartment manager (in the form of a very expensive mortgage) and then having the apartment manager rent out "rooms" in his very large "house" to cover his mortgage? In short, the longer I think about the idea, the less practical it becomes.
- brk 11y ago
  I've bought a few houses, the process has generally been simple and painless (other than the physical moving of stuff part, which is the same for own vs. rent). My last few vehicles purchases have involved significantly more paperwork and signatures than my most recent property purchases. What is it about the process that you've had issues with?
  - 0xffff2 11y ago
    Our experiences differ vastly. Granted I've only bought one house and it was 8 years ago. Maybe things have gotten better in the intervening years? My experience buying cars has involved signing maybe a dozen pages, while my experience buying a house involved signing form after form after form (most of which I didn't really know the purpose of) for literally hours. I'm certain I spent more time just signing paperwork to buy my house than I've ever spent on the entire car buying process from the time I walked into the sales guy's office after the test drive to the time I drove off the lot.

narrator 11y ago

Being a Bay Area native, my opinion is that the push back to increased growth is due to the horrible traffic situation. More people means traffic gets worse, muni gets more crowded, commutes get longer. The only people who want growth are real estate developers and recent transplants who are fine with not trying to actually go anywhere besides home and work. There's a point where the congestion starts to lower quality of life drastically and people would rather deal with high rents then being stuck in traffic for hours or stuffed into a filled to the gills muni, bart or caltrain with people coughing up flem around them. Getting to work in downtown is awful when there's a Giants game going on and they wanted to eliminate pier 30 parking and put another stadium in there? I'm glad that got shot down. San Francisco is full. Get over it.

api 11y ago
Too bad transportation infrastructure is completely verboten in America. New York has it grandfathered in (was built before the car era) and New York does not have this problem. The simple reality is that cars don't scale beyond a certain density because, well, cars can't pass through other cars. Cars work fine for light to medium density but beyond that you must either build trains or stop growing. (Or waste billions and countless hours every day with millions of people stuck in traffic.)
- tsunamifury 11y ago
  My favorite part is that SF has gotten it in its head that being car-unfriendly (planned closing of Market St) is a great idea, while not improving public transit at all.

AlexWest 11y ago

People who want to move here (for opportunities or work) by definition do not have an established life here, are not part of our community, do not have family and friends they have known for years based here, and have not worked to contribute to making San Francisco what it is. I am not overly concerned about how hard it may be for them to arrive.

wmil 11y ago

It's interesting that SF can be so pro-immigration on the national level, but so anti-immigration on the municipal level.

cgy1 11y ago
Because it's somehow become socially acceptable to hate on whites and Asians.
- millermp12 11y ago
  Not sure if it's race, the Left's refrain should be: "You can Over Come, just don't Come Over Here."